Names of the Romani people

• 1. Introduction

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  Names of the Romani people carry centuries of contested history inside them. Walk through almost any language in Europe and you will find a different word for the same people, each word telling a different story about where those people were thought to come from. In English the word gypsy reaches back to at least 1514, when it first appeared in writing. Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare both used it. Yet that same word, embraced by some Romani people as a mark of pride, is rejected by others as a racial slur. So which name is right? Who decides? And what does the answer reveal about how a people have been seen, misunderstood, and fought to name themselves?

• 2. A Name Born from Misreading

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  English speakers in the 16th and 17th centuries spelled the same word in strikingly different ways: Egipcian, Egypcian, gypcian. The reasoning behind these spellings was simple, and simply wrong. Many people in Britain assumed Romani people had come from Egypt. As the word passed through generations, the initial capital E was lost, leaving gypsy with a lowercase g. The Spanish term gitano, the French gitan, and the Basque ijito all trace back to the same Egyptian misidentification. Even in Crimean Tatar and Nogai, the people were called by a word meaning Pharaoh, though with a derogatory edge. Over time, the idea of the gypsy shifted further still. It accumulated associations with nomadism and exoticism that had nothing to do with its original, mistaken geography. John Matthews, in The World Atlas of Divination, described gypsies as Wise Women, one small sign of how the word had wandered far from any precise meaning.

• 3. The Law and the Label

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  Gypsy is not only a cultural term in Britain. It carries legal weight. The Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960 defined gipsies as persons of nomadic habit of life, whatever their race or origin, deliberately excluding members of organised travelling showmen's groups and travelling circuses. That legal definition was broad enough to include non-Romani groups such as Irish Travellers. Romani people gained recognition as a distinct ethnic group for the purposes of the Race Relations Act 1976 only after the court ruling Commission for Racial Equality v Dutton in 1989. Irish Travellers in England and Wales received equivalent recognition in 2000, following O'Leary v Allied Domecq, having already secured it in Northern Ireland in 1997. A British House of Commons committee report published in 2019, titled Tackling inequalities faced by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, addressed the naming question directly. It noted that while some community members found the term Gypsy offensive, many stakeholders and witnesses were proud to associate themselves with the term, and the committee decided it was right and proper to use it where appropriate throughout the report.

• 4. Untouchables and Sorcerers

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  Across much of continental Europe, Romani people are known by names rooted in the Greek term tsinganoi. That word traces back to Byzantine Greek athinganos, built from the prefix a- meaning not and the verb thingano meaning to touch, making it directly comparable to the word untouchable. The name was first applied to the sect of the Melchisedechians. An 11th-century text preserved at Mount Athos, The Life of Saint George the Athonite, written in Georgian, describes a group called the Adsincani as a Samaritan people, descendants of Simon the Magician, renowned sorcerers and villains. In that same text, the Byzantine emperor Constantine Monomachos employs the Adsincani to exterminate wild animals that were destroying game in the imperial park of Philopation. The word tsinganoi then migrated across languages, producing Zigeuner in German, zingari in Italian, and similar forms elsewhere, each carrying the shadow of that original, hostile label.

• 5. What Roma Means

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  Roma is today the preferred political term in many international contexts. The United Nations and the US Library of Congress use Romani as the noun for the ethnic group. The World Roma Congress and the Council of Europe take a different position, recommending that Roma be used as the collective noun while Romani be reserved specifically for the language and culture. In English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Rom is both a noun and an adjective; its plural is Roma or Roms. Romani functions the same way, with the plural Romanies. Both words have been in use in English since the 19th century as alternatives to Gypsy. The spelling sometimes shifts to Romany or Rommany. In Romania, a double-r spelling, rrom and rromani, has become established to separate the word from the Romanian endonym romani, to which it has no etymological connection. That double r represents a phoneme found in some Romani dialects that is genuinely distinct from the single-r sound. Following the first World Romani Congress in London, Roma and Rom began spreading more widely as the preferred terms in Central and Eastern Europe.

• 6. Roots in Sanskrit

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  All three demonyms, Romani, Lom, and Dom, share a single etymological origin. The Sanskrit source described a man of low caste, living by singing and music. The stem of that Sanskrit word connects to drumming. It links to a Sanskrit verbal root meaning to sound as a drum, possibly borrowed from a Dravidian language. Proposed Dravidian cognates include the Kannada word damara, meaning a pair of kettle-drums, and the Telugu word tamatama, meaning a drum or tomtom. The ultimate origin of the Sanskrit term, possibly Munda or Dravidian, remains uncertain. That uncertainty stretches back to the earliest layers of recorded language, long before the Romani people first appeared in European historical texts.

• 7. Bohemians and Subgroup Names

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  Because many Roma living in France had arrived via Bohemia, French speakers called them Bohemiens. That word later detached from any ethnic meaning and came to describe a particular artistic and economically precarious lifestyle, giving the world the concept of Bohemianism. Beyond the broad collective names, dozens of subgroup names exist, each one a self-designation within Romani communities. The Sinti are the self-named group of German-speaking Europe. In France, the preferred self-designation is Manush. The groups in Spain, Wales, and Finland use Calé, Kalé, and Kaale respectively, all derived from the Romani word kalo meaning black. Other named groups include the Kalderash, Boyash, Lovari, Lautari, Machvaya, Romanichal, Romanisael, Xoraxai, Xaladytka, Romungro, Ursari, and Sevlengere. The Romani of Scandinavia are commonly known as Romer or Tater, or Romanisael in Scandoromani. In Bulgaria, some people of Romani heritage identify as Turks, Bulgarians, or Romanians rather than Romani, reflecting how identity, persecution, and self-naming intersect in living, complicated ways.